Posts from 2008

I’ve been in a funk for the past three or four days and I don’t know why. I mentioned it to David Kidder, founder and CEO of Clickable, at lunch yesterday and he said "you need to hit the reset button".

If only there were such a button. Sometimes music does it for me. A good laugh is another great reset button. A hug can do wonders. My friend Paul told me that running got him through the first wave of the subprime mess last summer.

I think mental health is an important part of overall health and I’ve invested a lot of time and energy over the years in getting a handle on mine. I am curious to hear what all of you do when you need to hit the reset button.

I am not sure what I said, but apparently the Chinese authorities don’t like this blog. I got this from a friend and reader:

Hi Fred,

I’m in Shanghai, and it looks like aVC is now blocked in China (it wasn’t before).

Shame, since I just moved here. Oh well, will use a proxy J But I tought you’d be interested to know

Is there anyway to get "un-banned? I wonder if its the entire blogs.com domain that is being blocked?

There is another url you can get this blog at. It’s avcblogs.com. I never knew that until I saw it on google the other day.

I spent some time yesterday morning building a "backdrop" to a talk that I am giving tomorrow on "Investing In The Future". I wanted to share it with some people and thought that doing it via the web might be the best way. So I tried out Slideshare after getting advice from my twitter followers on what service was best for the job.

The Slideshare service is very straightforward. My only complaint is that it took at least twelve hours and possibly more (I went to bed before it finished) to convert from .ppt to flash. Based on my analysis of how YouTube got to be king of video sharing on the web and beat google, I think immediate gratification is an important feature and would highly encourage Slideshare to work on that.

As for as quality, you can assess that yourself. Sorry for the lack of audio track. I am providing that live and in person tomorrow.

Now here is a surprise. Microsoft has apparently agreed to acquire Xobni.

Don’t get me wrong. I love the product and I love the team. The day I saw them demo at Y Combinator, I knew they were going to do something important.

But first Lookout and now Xobni. It’s sort of proof that Microsoft doesn’t know how to improve it’s own software. So they buy those that do.

If this is true, congrats to Matt and Adam.

Randall Stross’ Digital Domain column in the NY Times is one of my favorite regular features of the Times. This week he tackles an issue near and dear to my heart: email overload.

For a brief period last year, I was the poster boy of email bankruptcy because the media picked up on this post and it percolated for a month or two, including landing in my parents home town paper. They got a chuckle out of seeing my name in their daily read.

Fortunately, the poster boys (at least for Randall) are now Mike Arrington and Mark Cuban. Based on the numbers that Randall cites for Mike and Mark’s incoming email, I can say that I do feel their pain, literally. I get that kind of volume too.

And let me tell you, there is only one workable solution that I’ve ever heard to deal with 1000 incoming emails a day that all want a reply. It’s turning your inbox over to an assistant or a group of assistants as Randall points out that Thomas Edison did:

This was the solution  Thomas Edison
used in pre-electronic times to handle a mismatch between 100,000-plus
unsolicited letters and a single human addressee. Not all
correspondents would receive a reply — a number were filed in what
Edison called his “nut file.” But most did get a written letter from
Edison’s office, prepared by men who were full-time secretaries. They
became skilled in creating the impression that Edison had taken a
personal interest in whatever topic had prompted the correspondent to
write.

I am not going to do that. I believe that if people wanted a note from my super nice assistant, they would send her the email not me.

I do forward many of the emails that come to me with new investment opportunities to Andrew who does a way better job than I do at replying to all of them. But even then, I don’t always get to every email so not everyone gets to Andrew.

Randall talks quite a bit about HL Mencken who apparently answered every letter he received on the day he received it. I think a lot has changed in the century (or at least the half century) since HL was doing that.

First, the letters he was responding to were written once and sent. There was no write once, send many technology working it’s nasty effects on his inbox back then.

And the time delay between sending and recieving letters meant that letter writing was saved for things that were not urgent. We have the opposite effect at work now. Urgent emails are missed because of all the email that is not urgent and may not even be relevant.

And of course, I don’t do email with a cigar in my mouth. Maybe I should.

But there is one thing that Menken said that rings true to me and may be the source of my email anxiety.

“If I write to a man on any proper business and he fails to answer me at once, I set him down as a boor and an ass.”

I am sure that every day people are setting me down as a boor and an ass and that’s a problem. Without a solution as far as I can see.

Jason Goldman at Twitter used to be the Blogger product manager at Google. So when he saw the comscore chart on my wordpress vs facebook post yesterday, he asked what comscore’s numbers are for Blogger. Here they are. As usual Google is the king dog. 190mm unique people saw a blogger served page last month. That’s >20% of every Internet user in the world. Wow.

Great discussion yesterday about wordpress vs facebook. As always the post was just the kickoff of a wonderful discussion that is 75 comments long at this time. The big debate was whether blogging was truly social behavior and whether a blog platform could "know" anything about it’s readers.

On that there is no question in my mind. This morning I was working through all 75 comments and was floored by this one from PH Bradley. I’ve been marvelling at PH’s words in this blog’s comments for a while now. But enough is enough. Who is this guy? I need to know him, read him, follow him. Thankfully, all that one has to do when faced with that moment is hover over a person’s face in disqus and their profiles (note the plural) will be revealed. Like this:

I clicked on all of them, Phillipe is now a friend on facebook, a contact on linkedin, I follow him on twitter, and his feed is in my reader.

That’s the kind of adult social networking I was talking about in my post yesterday. Or as Phil said in the comment I linked to, comments are the blog’s spinal cord. Indeed.

 

Is about $14.8bn according to the publicly available information about the most recent financings of the two companies ($15bn for Facebook and $200mm for Automattic).

But consider this comscore chart of unique visitors over the past year.

It’s a very similar growth trajectory, driven largely by the same phenomenon – the creation of personal spaces on the web by people who want to engage with others.

So why is Facebook worth $15bn and WordPress is worth $200mm? Well for one, Facebook controls the advertising inventory on the pages it serves and WordPress does not. And for another, Facebook has built a "soup to nuts" social network with powerful viral channels (which they are cutting back on) and WordPress has not.

But trust me on this one. The blogging revolution is the adult social network whereas Facebook style social networking is for teens and college kids. This gap will narrow.

I’ve gotten a bit tired of going to events populated by all the usual suspects. I am meeting lots of new people through this blog, tumblr, twitter, etc but I have not been able to say the same thing about the real world events I’ve been attending.

So I’ve decided to do something about that.

Today I did two meetups that were both the kind of thing I want to do more of.

Open Coffee

There are apparently open coffees all over the country and all over the world. Here in NYC, there is a New York Open Coffee for entrepreneurs every Thursday at 9:15am at Taralucci (what Peter Kafka of Alley Insider calls the "USV Cafeteria"). Nicholas Butterworth runs this open coffee and he uses Meetup to organize it. Here’s the meetup page if you want to join.

I liked this one a lot because I only knew two of the eight people who attended. The conversation was lively and the coffee at Taralucci is among the best in the city. It lasted an hour. There’s no way I can go every Thursday and it seems like most people don’t do that. But I do hope to attend at least once a month.

Shake Shack Flash Mob

This one was my idea. Last week I wanted to go to the Shake Shack but nobody was around here in the office. So I twittered about it and six people showed up. We decided then and there to create a twitter account called Shake Shack. Now anytime anyone is in the same shoes as I was last week, they simply send a twitter to @shakeshack saying when they think they’ll be at the front of the line and everyone who follows shakeshack on twitter will be alerted. I did it again today and we had about ten people. It was a glorious day and the conversation was great. I hope these become regular events throughout the summer. It’s great because only one person has to stand in line and anyone can join as long as they are up for a group lunch with fun people and lively discussion.

If you know of other ideas like this here in NYC or elsewhere, please leave a comment so we can all start meeting new people and talking about new ideas.